I was running.

I was back to running my company in Palo Alto, sometimes I’d go there for a few days, before returning to L.A. I had hoped to run into Gemma when I stopped into Winsome for lunch, but she wasn’t there, and I was determined not to contact her. If I couldn’t be her best friend, I refused to be her friend. If I couldn’t be her husband for real, I didn’t want to be the guy she was secretly married to and had once tried dating for a few weeks. I wasn’t going to make any promises to her about waiting for her to come around, but I’d made a promise to myself.

The only thing I knew for certain was that I loved her, in every way that I could. I had no idea how to stop being jealous or how to always trust that everything she felt for me was real and for me alone. I didn’t know how to prove to her that I had gotten over that, or if I ever would, but I could stop being possessive. Letting her go was the most obvious way I could think of to show her that. I would let her do what she needed to do, to figure out that I was hers, even if she needed to be away from me to do it. Even if I fucking hated every fucking minute of it. Even if a part of me was afraid that I was doing the wrong thing.

I was running three to five miles a day every morning, and I was running myself ragged because I didn’t want to slow down enough to realize that there was a chance I might never have her in my life again, in any way. On weekends I signed up for any 5 or 10K race I could find, to keep myself busy around other people—people who cared more about running than talking to me about my business or personal life. Before bed, I’d work out with free weights and do push-ups and sit-ups until every one of my muscles screamed in pain as loud as my stupid heart.

It was one thing to feel like crap before we’d actually tried, but now I was experiencing my first big failure, and for a few days it had affected my outlook on absolutely everything. What was I even doing with my life? Why had I ever left Canada? Why had I chosen to create high tech sports technology when I could have invented a nanotech suit for flying and fighting criminals, or learning to use technology to cure cancer or eliminate poverty and hunger and war? Nothing made sense anymore.

All I could do was put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward and hope that one day I’d find myself in a place that didn’t feel totally desolate without Gemma in it.

Apparently, the women of Southern California have a thing for guys who are blatantly crying on the inside. For the first time ever, I had felt invisible to the women of Palo Alto, who know it’s best to ignore a techpreneur when he’s on a downswing. But at the Gelson’s in Silver Lake, when I was buying almond milk and the sad bachelor special tuna salad at the deli, women were practically rubbing up against me and offering to take me home so they could make me soup. I didn’t want their soup. I wanted Gemma to make me soup. And then I wanted to eat it naked on my sofa while we watched The Departed and then fuck the sadness away.

But that wasn’t going to happen, and I managed to avoid alcohol as much as possible so that I didn’t accidentally let it happen with someone other than Gemma. The one time I met up with Ethan at a lounge in Pasadena, I managed to act very tough and optimistic for about twenty minutes, saying things like: “Hey, we gave it a shot but it didn’t work out. We’ll be friends again, eventually.” After my second scotch, I was morose, and after the fourth the last thing I said was: “Fuck. I should have fought harder for her. I fucked up.” And then I’m told I fell asleep in the booth and Ethan drove me home and put me to bed.

The next morning, while I was rehydrating and killing time before having a Lyft take me to my car in Pasadena, I called my Mom.

“Theo?” she answered, on the second ring. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.” You’d think I never called her. Well, mostly she called me, but it’s not like I was some negligent son.

“Is it my birthday? Is it Mother’s Day?”

“Alright, alright.”

“Honey. What’s wrong?”

I was quiet for a moment. “You’ve been okay, right? Since the divorce?”

“Since the divorce? It’s been years…Oh, honey. Is it you and Gemma?”

“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. We tried to make things work, you know, for real. But I guess it didn’t feel right for her.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Do you want to come home for a visit?”

I laughed. “I can’t, I’m busy with work.”

“Well you don’t have to laugh. I might not be a tech genius, but I think I read somewhere that people can do all kinds of work from their laptops and phones nowadays. We do have WiFi in Canada, you know. And I just bought a box of Cadbury chocolate bars and there’s a sale on Old Dutch potato chips at Loblaws. Okay okay, I’m not going to beg.”

“Mom. I would love to visit you. Believe me. But I can’t right now. Can you just answer my question?”

“Have I been okay? That’s the question? Well, yeah. Isn’t it obvious? I mean. I know it was rough for a while there, at first. Okay, it really sucked at first. Your father was being an idiot for a couple of years. But I got to have another life. It wasn’t what I was looking for at the time, but I’m grateful now. I would never have been able to devote myself to finishing my Masters degree, and having a career. I would never have met so many nice men and found out for certain that I didn’t want to marry them…”

“How many nice men are we talking about here? No, don’t tell me. But did you wish that Dad had fought harder? To stay married?”

She was quiet for a bit before answering. I could hear her opening a bag of potato chips and then munching on them. Was every woman that I loved going to torture me?

“I remember you always used to talk about how marathon runners can ‘hit the wall’ in the middle of a race, and how afraid you were of doing that at first, but then you realized that it was only after you hit the wall that you were strong enough to keep going past it.”

“Yeah…”

“I was so angry at your father for giving up on us when we hit the wall, but…it just took us both a really long time to realize we were strong enough to move past it.”

“What are you saying—are you guys—”

“I’m saying that it is very rare for two people to be able to run at the same pace all the time, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t on the same path. I wouldn’t give up on Gemma, if I were you. There’s more than one way to fight for something. Just get on with your life, and give her a chance to catch up.”

I was about to tell my Mom that she was brilliant and ask her what the hell she meant about her and my Dad, but she told me someone was at the door and hung up.

When I was sixteen, and hadn’t perfected my stride yet, I got Achilles tendinitis and didn’t rest my ankle long enough for it to heal as quickly as it should have. I was not going to make that mistake with this situation with Gemma now. I would keep the pressure off of it for as long as it took. No matter how much it hurt.

“I’ll go first and I’ll be there waiting for you if you panic.”

It’s what I told her before we jumped off of that cliff, and I meant it.